Kublai Khan’s ascendancy in 1260 marked a definite change in Mongol government practice. Kublai moved the seat of Mongol government from Karakorum in Mongolia to Shangdu (“Upper Capital”), near present-day Dolun in Inner Mongolia. In 1267 the official capital was transferred to Zhongdu, where Kublai ordered the construction of a new walled city, replete with grand palaces and official quarters, that was renamed Dadu (“Great Capital”) before its completion. Under its Turkicized name, Cambaluc (Khan-baliq, “The Khan’s Town”), the capital became known throughout Asia and even Europe. But, true to nomad traditions, the Mongol court continued to move between these two residences—Shangdu in summer and Dadu in winter. With the establishment of Dadu as the seat of the central bureaucracy, Mongolia and Karakorum no longer remained the centre of the Mongol empire. Mongolia began to fall back to the status of a northern borderland, where a nomadic way of life continued and where Mongol grandees, dissatisfied with the growing Sinicization of the court, repeatedly engaged in rebellions.

Kublai, who even prior to 1260 had surrounded himself with Chinese advisers such as the eminent Buddho-Daoist Liu Bingzhong and several former Jin scholar-officials, was still the nominal overlord of the other Mongol dominions (ulus) in Asia. By then, however, his Chinese entourage had persuaded him to accept the role of a traditional Chinese emperor. A decisive step was taken in 1271 when the Chinese dominion was given a Chinese dynastic name—Da Yuan, the “Great Origin.” Before this the Chinese name for the Mongol state was Da Chao (“Great Dynasty”), introduced about 1217. It was a translation of the Mongol name Yeke Mongghol Ulus (“Great Mongol Nation”) adopted by Genghis Khan about 1206. The new name, however, was a departure from Chinese traditions. All earlier Chinese dynasties were named for ancient feudal states or geographic terms; even the Khitan and the Juchen had followed this tradition by naming their states Liao (for the Liao River in Manchuria) and Jin (“Gold,” for a river in Manchuria that had a Juchen name with that meaning). Yuan was the first nongeographic name of a Chinese dynasty since Wang Mang established the Xin dynasty (ad 9–25).

During the 1260s the central bureaucracy and the local administration of the Chinese empire were remodeled on Chinese lines, with certain alterations introduced by the Jin state. The Central Secretariat remained the most important civilian authority, with specialized agencies such as the traditional six ministries of finance, war, officials, rites, punishments, and public works. The Shumiyuan (Military Council) was another institution inherited from previous dynasties. A Yushitai (Censorate) was originally created for remonstrations against the emperor and criticism of policies, but increasingly it became an instrument of the court itself and a tool to eliminate other members of the bureaucracy. In the main the territorial divisions followed Chinese models, but the degree of local independence was much smaller than it had been under the Song; the provincial administrations were actually branches of the Central Secretariat. The structures of the various provincial administrations throughout China were smaller replicas of the Central Secretariat. According to Chinese sources, in 1260–61 the lower echelons in the Central Secretariat were mostly Chinese; the high offices, however, even if they had traditional Chinese names, were reserved for non-Chinese. Surprisingly, Kublai Khan had few Mongols in high administrative positions; apparently suspicious of some of his tribal leaders, he preferred absolute foreigners. The military sphere was affected least by the attempts to achieve a synthesis between Chinese and native ways of life; there the Mongol aristocracy remained supreme.

Too many antagonistic social and ethnic groups existed within the Yuan government to secure a stable rule. The traditional Chinese value system had largely disappeared, and no political ethics had replaced it. While personalized loyalty focused on the ruler, the companionship of nökör relations was not enough to amalgamate the heterogeneous ruling group into a stable body. This unbalanced system of government could function only under a strong ruler; under a weak or incompetent emperor, disintegration was certain, and a decline in efficiency resulted.

The former scholar-officials of China remained to a great extent outside the governmental and administrative structure; only minor positions were open to them. The Mongols never made full use of the administrative potential of the scholar-officials, fearing their competence and abilities. The ruling foreign minority in China was more an elite of the colonialist type than a part of the Chinese social system.

The unwillingness of the Mongols to assimilate with the Chinese is shown by their attempts to cement the inequalities of their rule. After the Song empire had been conquered, the population of China was divided into four classes. The first class was the Mongols themselves, a tiny but privileged minority. Next came the semuren (“persons with special status”), confederates of the Mongols such as Turks or Middle Eastern Muslims. The third group was called the hanren (a term that generally means Chinese but that was used to designate the inhabitants of only northern China); this class included the Chinese and other ethnic groups living in the former Jin state, as well as Xi Xia, Juchen, Khitan, Koreans, Bohai, and Tangut, who could be employed in some functions and who also formed military units under Mongol leadership. The last group was the nanren, or manzi, pejorative terms in Chinese, meaning “southern barbarian,” which designated the former subjects of Song China (about three-fourths of the Chinese empire). The lowest stratum in Yuan China was occupied by the slaves, whose numbers were quite considerable. Slave status was hereditary, and only under certain conditions could a slave be freed.

More than four-fifths of the taxpayers came from the nanren group, which was generally barred from holding higher office (only rarely would one of them rise to some prominence). The Mongols and the semuren were tax-exempt and enjoyed the protection of the law to a higher degree than did the hanren and nanren.

The formal distinction between various ethnic groups and the corresponding graded status was not a Mongol invention but a social differentiation inherited from the Jin state. In the same way, many institutions were taken over from the Jin. Law in Yuan China was based partly on the legislation of the Jin and partly on traditional Chinese law; Mongol legal practices and institutions also played a great role, particularly in penal law. The Yuan legal code has been preserved in the dynastic history, Yuanshi, as well as other sources. In addition, many rules, ordinances, and decisions of individual cases are collected in compilations such as Yuandianzhang, which throw much light not only on the legal system but also on social conditions in general.

Mongol and Chinese dualism is also reflected in the problem of administrative documents and languages. Few of the ruling Mongols, even in the later years of the Yuan, knew Chinese, and the number who mastered the Chinese script was still smaller. On the other hand, only a few Chinese bothered to learn the language of their conquerors. Administration and jurisdiction therefore had to rely largely on interpreters and translators. Mongol was the primary language; most decisions, ordinances, and decrees were originally drafted in Mongol, and a Chinese interlinear version was added. This Chinese version was in the colloquial language instead of the formal documentary style, and it followed the Mongol word order so that it must have seemed barbaric to the native literati. Many of these Chinese versions have survived in collections such as Yuandianzhang.

Economy

The Mongol conquest of the Song empire had, for the first time since the end of the Tang, reunified all of China. Song China had traded with its neighbours, the Liao and the Jin, but trade had been strictly controlled and limited to authorized border markets. The Mongol conquest therefore reintegrated China’s economy. The Mongol administration, in its desire to utilize the resources of the former Song territory, the most prosperous part of China, tried to promote internal trade and aimed at a fuller integration of north and south. The region around the capital was dependent on grain transports from the south, and large quantities of food and textiles were needed to keep the Mongol garrisons. The Grand Canal, which had linked the river systems of the Yangtze, the Huai, and the Huang since the early 7th century, was repaired and extended to Dadu in 1292–93 with the use of corvée (unpaid labour) under the supervision of a distinguished Chinese astronomer and hydraulic engineer, Guo Shoujing—an action entirely within Chinese tradition. This was preceded, however, by another measure in the field of economic communications that was unorthodox in Chinese eyes: about 1280, concessions for grain transport overseas were granted to some private Chinese entrepreneurs from the southeastern coastal region (some Chinese government officials were traditionally antagonistic toward private trade and enterprise, an attitude that the ruling Mongols did not share). These private shipowners transported in their fleets grain from the lower Yangtze region to northern Chinese harbours and from there to the capital. Early in the 14th century, however, these private fleet owners, who had made huge fortunes, were accused of treason and piracy, and the whole action was abolished. The Mongol government never replaced them with government fleets.

Another factor that contributed to the flourishing internal trade in China was standardized currency. The Song and Jin had issued paper money but only in addition to bronze coins, which had remained the basic legal tender. The Yuan government was the first to make paper money the only legal currency throughout the empire (1260). This facilitated financial transactions in the private sector as well as in the state treasuries. As long as the economy as such remained productive, the reliance on paper money as the basic currency had no detrimental effects. Only when the economy began to disintegrate under the last Mongol ruler did the paper money become gradually valueless and inflation set in. One reason for the paper currency might have been that much bronze and copper was used for the Buddhist cult and its statues, another that metal ores in China proper were insufficient to supply enough coins for some 80 million people.

Religious and intellectual life

The Mongols did not try to impose their own religion (a cult of heaven, the forces of nature, and shamanistic practices) on their subjects. This gave comparative freedom to the existing religions in China, including what the Mongol rulers considered to be the sanjiao (“three teachings”): Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. Both Daoism and Buddhism retained their distinctive identities and organizations; although they often rivaled each other, they were not mutually exclusive. The Neo-Confucianism of the Zhu Xi school enjoyed orthodox status after the 1310s, but adherents of the three teachings interacted philosophically and intellectually in a way that popularized the “amalgamation” of the three schools among the common people and the literati, if not the foreign residents, of China.

Daoism

Under the Jin dynasty several popular Daoist sects had flourished in northern China, and Genghis Khan had apparently been impressed by the Daoist patriarch Changchun. In 1223 Genghis Khan granted to Changchun and his followers full exemption from taxes and other duties demanded by the government; this was the first of a series of edicts granting special privileges to the clergy of the various religions in China.

For some time it seemed as if Chinese Daoism would win favour with the Mongol rulers at the expense of Chinese Buddhism. The Buddhists, however, also profited from the open-minded attitude at the court; they tried to win influence within the imperial family, prompted by the fact that many Buddhist institutions had been occupied by the Daoists, who relied on Mongol favour. Under the grand khan Möngke, several discussions were held between the Daoist and Buddhist clergy (1255–58), ending in a ruling that the former Buddhist temples should be returned to their original purpose. Imperial orders also outlawed some apocryphal Daoist texts, in which Buddhism was presented as a branch of Daoism and the Buddha as a reincarnation of Laozi, the founder of Daoism. But Daoism as such continued to exist under the Yuan, and the fiscal privileges originally granted to the Daoist followers of Changchun were extended on principle to all clergies.

Buddhism

The spokesmen of Chinese Buddhism under the early Mongol rulers came from the Chan (Zen) sect (a discipline focused on meditation). Their high intellectuality and refined aestheticism, however, did not appeal to the Mongols, who felt more attracted by the mixture of magic practices, rather nebulous metaphysics, and impressive symbolism in the visual arts of Tibetan Buddhism. Kublai Khan appointed a young Tibetan lama known by the honorific name of ’Phags-pa as imperial preceptor (dishi); ’Phags-pa became the head of the Buddhist faith in all Mongol dominions, including China. A special government agency was established in 1264 to deal with Buddhism and served as a sort of bureau for the imperial preceptor; it was in charge not only of Buddhist affairs in general but also of Tibetan affairs, although Tibet remained outside the administration of China proper, and no Mongol garrisons were ever established in Tibet. Tibetan politicians had thus succeeded in winning over the Mongol court and in retaining a more-than-nominal independence.

After the conquest of Song China, a special agency for the supervision of Buddhism in southern China was established and placed under the control of another Tibetan lama. There thus existed two supervisory offices for Buddhism—one in Dadu for northern China and Tibet and one in Lin’an for southern China. The southern office caused great resentment among Chinese Buddhists and the population at large by its brutal and avaricious procedures, property seizures, and extortions from the population. Throughout the Yuan dynasty, complaints continued against the arrogant behaviour of Tibetan lamas. (Under the last emperor, Togon-temür, Tibetan clerics introduced the court to sexual rites calling for intercourse with consecrated females—practices not unfamiliar in Indian and Tibetan cultures but shocking to the Chinese elite.)

Although Buddhism had won a victory among the ruling minority of China, it was a foreign rather than a Chinese Buddhism. The national varieties of Buddhism, especially Chan Buddhism, continued to exist, and monasteries in southern China sometimes became islands of traditional civilization where monks and lay Buddhists alike cultivated poetry, painting, and all the intellectual pastimes of the Chinese literati class, but, on the whole, Chinese Buddhism suffered from the general conditions in the Yuan empire. The exemption from taxes and corvée attracted many persons to monastic life for purely utilitarian reasons; the more society disintegrated, the more people sought refuge behind the monastery walls. About 1300 the number of monks throughout China was estimated at 500,000, and it must have grown during the last decades of Mongol rule. Monks played a great role in the rebellions to which the Yuan empire eventually succumbed; also, the first Ming emperor had been a monk for some time.

Foreign religions

Tibetan Buddhism always remained outside Chinese civilization, as did other imported religions. A certain number of Muslims came to China, all from the Middle East or from Central Asia. The Turkic Öngüt tribe was largely Nestorian Christian. Many tombstones with a bilingual Turkic and Chinese inscription have been preserved, but none of these believers seems to have been Chinese by origin; a census taken about 1300 in Zhenjiang (in the present-day province of Jiangsu) lists the Nestorians together with foreign nationalities. The number of Nestorian Christians in China was so great that in 1289 a special agency for their supervision was established in Dadu. Manichaeism, which had spread to China under the Tang, became extinct as an organized religion under the Yuan, but some Manichaean communities were probably absorbed by messianic Buddhist sects, such as the White Lotus sect, a group that attracted many followers among the Chinese lower classes.

Confucianism

Confucianism was perceived by the Mongols as a Chinese religion, and it had mixed fortunes under their rule. The teachings of the Neo-Confucian school of Zhu Xi from the Song period were introduced to the Mongol court at Zhongdu in the late 1230s but were confined to limited circles there and in northern China. Confucian scholars enjoyed the benefits extended to the clergy of all religions, but they were dealt a strong blow when the literary examinations were discontinued following the Mongol conquest. For many centuries the examinations, based on Confucian texts, had been the basis for the selection of officials and for their privileged position within the state and society. After Kublai’s accession, Confucianism had a more cordial reception at the Mongol court through the efforts of Chinese advisers such as Liu Bingzhong and the great Confucian master Xu Heng. Under their stewardship a certain Confucianization took place in government and education. Chinese rituals were performed for a while in the dynastic temple (taimiao), erected in Zhongdu in 1263. State sacrifices were offered to Confucius, and the study of the Classics was encouraged. However, many of the rites observed at the court that were either Tibetan Buddhist or inherited from the Mongol nomadic past were continued. The emperor Buyantu (reigned 1311–20), one of the most Sinicized Mongol rulers, reintroduced the examination system in 1313, but it remains doubtful how well the examinations functioned. They certainly did not guarantee an official career, as those under the Song and, to a certain extent, under the Jin had done.

The system of the Yuan, as introduced in 1313, provided different types of curricula for Mongols, other foreigners (semuren), and Chinese; also, the requirements were different: Chinese had to show their complete mastery of the curriculum, whereas Mongols and other foreigners had to give only a mediocre performance. This inequality was even formalized for the candidates who were to be admitted to the state academy (guozijian). The first examinations were held in the presence of the emperor in 1315, and, of the 300 persons granted the title of doctor (jinshi), 75 were Mongols, 75 were other foreigners, 75 were northern Chinese (hanren), and 75 came from southern China; they all received official positions within the bureaucracy, Mongols the higher and Chinese the lower posts. The positions of power within the hierarchy remained in the hands of the Mongols and other foreigners.

Under Buyantu, for the first time the interpretation and commentaries of the Neo-Confucian school were made obligatory. This cemented Neo-Confucian ideology not only among the Chinese literati who wished to pass an examination but also for future generations. Chinese Confucian orthodoxy from the 14th to the 19th century therefore rested largely on the foundations it had received under the Yuan. In spite of all this, Classical scholarship under the Yuan did not produce a single remarkable work but struggled under an adverse political and intellectual climate. Striving to preserve their sacred tradition, the Confucian scholars were content with expounding the doctrines laid down by the Song philosophers, seeking to harmonize the different philosophical issues and points of view rather than exploring new horizons.

Literature

Chinese literature of the period also showed conservative tendencies. Poetry composition remained a favourite pastime of the educated class, including the Sinicized scholars of Mongol, Central Asian, and western Asian origins, but no great works or stylistic innovations were created. During the last chaotic decades of the Yuan, some notable poets emerged, such as the versatile Yang Weizhen and the bold and unconventional Gao Qi. Many prose works dealing with contemporary events and persons were written under the Yuan, but these are notable for their content, not their literary merit. Surprisingly harsh criticism and satire against the Mongols and also undisguised Song loyalism found open expression, presumably because the Mongols were uninterested in what the Chinese wrote in Chinese and, moreover, were mostly unable to read it. Some writers collected rare or interesting and piquant items and transmitted many aspects of Song culture to future generations. The lament for the refinement and grandeur of the Song is a constant theme in Yuan writings.

During the early Yuan period, the traditional Chinese official historiography was restored under the charge of the Hanlin Academy, which sponsored the compilation of the official dynastic histories of the Song, Liao, and Jin states conquered by the Mongols and undertook the compilation of the reign chronicles (shilu) and other governmental compendiums. The major achievement of official historiography was the compilation (1329–33) of the Jingshi dadian, a repository of 800 juan (chapters) of official documents and laws; the text is now lost. Private historiography, especially works on the events of the Song, fared rather poorly under the Yuan because of the adverse political and intellectual climate. The most-distinguished contribution was written by Ma Duanlin and titled Wenxian tongkao (“General Study of the Literary Remains”): an encyclopaedic documentary history of Chinese institutions from the earliest times to the middle reign of the Nan Song dynasty.

In urban society a literature in the vernacular language began to flourish, untrammeled by rigid norms of formalistic or ideological orthodoxy. Novels and stories were written for the amusement of a wide-reading public, and dramatic literature reached such a peak in Yuan China that later literary criticism regarded the Yuan as the classical age for operatic arias, or qu (a word that is also used for a full opera, with arias and chanted recitatives). The collection Yuanquxuan (“Selection from Yuan Operas”), with 100 opera librettos, and the storyteller “prompt books” for dramatized historical romances such as Sanguo (“Three Kingdoms”) give ample evidence for the creativity and vitality of Chinese dramatic literature. This phenomenon may perhaps be considered as evidence that under the Yuan a certain urbanization took place and something like a bourgeoisie emerged, because dramatic literature and colloquial novels found their clientele chiefly among the merchant and artisan classes.

Foreigners, chiefly of Turkic or Persian origin, also contributed to Chinese literature under the Yuan. They wrote poetry and painted in the Chinese way in order to distinguish themselves in fields where they could gain prestige among the educated Chinese. All the foreigners who wrote in Chinese seem to have avoided any reference to their foreign origin or creed. Nothing, in fact, could be more Chinese than their productions. Even foreigners who, like the Persians, came from a country with a considerable literary tradition of its own never attempted to introduce their native forms, subject matter, or religions. No literary symbiosis seemed possible, and, although China was exposed to more external influences under the Yuan than ever before, Chinese literature shows little effect from such contacts with the outside world. It is perhaps symptomatic that under the Yuan no literary works from other civilizations were translated into Chinese and that practically no translations of Chinese Classical and historical works into Mongol have survived. There seemed to be only the alternatives of complete rejection of Chinese civilization, as practiced by most Mongols, or wholesale absorption by Chinese culture.

The arts

Conservatism played a dominant role in the arts during the Mongol period. In sponsored arts such as sculpture and ceramics, the Mongols’ desire to lay claim to the Chinese imperial heritage was not complemented by any strong artistic vision of their own, and conservatism meant mere perpetuation. Song, Liao, and Jin ceramic types were continued, often altered only by increased bulk, while the great artistic achievement of the era, blue-and-white ware, probably derived from non-imperial sources. Government-sponsored Buddhist sculpture often attained high artistic standards, preserving the realism and powerful expression of Tang and Song traditions, while in the finest sculpture of the time, such as the reliefs at Juyong Pass north of Dadu (1342–45), this was combined with a flamboyant surface decor and a striking dramatization better suited to foreign taste than to the increasingly restrained Chinese aesthetic.

Conservatism also tempered the private arts of calligraphy and painting: the scholar-amateurs who produced them felt impelled to preserve their heritage against a perceived barbarian threat. Conservatism, however, often took the form of a creative revival that combed the past for sources of inspiration and then artistically transformed them into a new idiom. In calligraphy, Zhao Mengfu gave new impetus to the 4th-century style of Wang Xizhi, which then became a standard for Chinese writing and book printing for centuries. In painting, Zhao and his contemporary Qian Xuan helped to complete the development of a distinctively amateur style that ushered in a new phase in the history of Chinese painting. Their work did not continue that of the previous generation but ranged widely over the available past tradition, and past styles rather than observed objects became the subject of artistic interpretation. The naturalism of Song painting gave way to calligraphically inspired abstractions. Paintings became closely linked in style to the written inscriptions that appeared upon them with increasing frequency and prominence. Skillful professional techniques and overt visual attractiveness were avoided, replaced by deliberate awkwardness and an intellectualized flavour. Their works were done for private purposes, often displaying or concealing personal and political motives, to be understood only by fellow literati through the subtle allusions of their subject matter, stylistic references, or inscriptions.

Example of xingshu by Zhao Mengfu, Yuan dynasty; in the …

Courtesy of the National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China

Naturalistic painting styles also continued in popularity throughout the first two-thirds of the period, painted by such important artists as Li Kan and Ren Renfa. Perpetuating northern traditions of the Tang and Song periods, these styles were practiced chiefly by scholar-officials associated with the court at the capital. Several members of the Mongol royal family became major patrons or collectors of such conservative styles, although imperial patronage remained slight in comparison with earlier periods.

Nine Horses, detail of a hand scroll by Ren Renfa, ink and colours on …

In the latter third of the dynasty, with a sharp decline in the practice of painting by scholar-officials and northerners, Yuan painting was increasingly represented by the innovative approach of Zhao Mengfu as practiced by reclusive scholars from the Suzhou-Wuxing area. Four of these—the landscape painters Huang Gongwang, Wu Zhen, Ni Zan, and Wang Meng—transformed and blended certain elements from the past into highly personal, easily recognizable styles and later came to be known as the Four Masters of the Yuan dynasty. In the early Ming period the Hongwu emperor decimated the Suzhou literati and with it Suzhou painting; by the end of the 15th century, however, Suzhou artists once again dominated Chinese painting, and the styles of the Four Masters became the most influential of all painting models in later Chinese history.

Yuan China and the West

As has been mentioned, Mongol rulers favoured trade in all their dominions. In China too they eliminated state trade controls that had existed under the Song and Jin, so that internal and external trade reached unprecedented proportions. It seems, however, that China’s transcontinental trade with the Middle East and Europe was in the hands of non-Chinese (mainly Persians, Arabs, and Syrians). Silk, the Chinese export commodity par excellence, reached the Middle East and even Europe via the caravan routes across Asia; Chinese ceramics were also exported, chiefly into the Islamic countries. The Asian countries concentrated their European trade largely with the Italian republics (e.g., Genoa, Venice). To the Italians, trade with the East was so important that the Practica della mercatura, a handbook on foreign trade, included the description of trade routes to China.

Direct contacts between China and Europe were insignificant, however, even though China was part of an empire stretching from Dadu to southern Russia. Chinese historical and geographic literature had little to say about the European parts of the Mongol empire; in the official dynastic history of the Yuan, references to foreign countries are limited to countries such as Korea, Japan, Nam Viet, Myanmar (Burma), and Champa, with which China had carried on trade or tributary relations for centuries, and there are some scattered data on Russia. For some time a Russian guards regiment existed in Dadu, and some Russian soldiers were settled in military colonies in eastern Manchuria. As a whole, however, the civilizations of Europe and China did not meet, although contacts were made easy; Europe remained for the Chinese a vague region somewhere “beyond the Uighur.”

More important were the contributions from the Islamic countries of the Middle East, chiefly in the fields of science and technology. During the reign of Kublai Khan, Arab-Persian astronomy and astronomical instruments were introduced into China, and the Chinese astronomer Guo Shoujing operated an observatory. Nevertheless, the basic conceptions of astronomy remained Chinese, and no attempt was made to adopt the Middle Eastern mathematical and theoretical framework. Similarly, Middle Eastern physicians and surgeons practiced successfully in China, but Chinese medical theory remained uninfluenced by Western practices. In geography a Chinese world map of the 14th century incorporates Arabic geographical knowledge into the Chinese worldview. It shows not only China and the adjacent countries but also the Middle East, Europe, and Africa; the African continent is already given in its actual triangular shape. But this knowledge probably never spread beyond a limited circle of professional geographers, and it is certain that the Sino-centric world conception continued unchallenged under the Yuan dynasty; no curiosity of what lay beyond the Chinese borders was aroused. For the countries to be reached by sea (such as Southeast Asian countries and India), Chinese works of the Yuan offer only a poor extract from the Song work Zhufanzhi (c. 1225; “Description of the Barbarians”).

The situation was different regarding European knowledge of China. The Mongol advance into eastern Europe had given Europeans an acute awareness that actual people lived in regions hitherto shrouded in vague folkloric legends and myths. The Islamic world had similarly become a reality to Europeans with the first Crusades. It was, therefore, only natural that the Roman Catholic Church looked for potential converts among non-Muslim people of Asia. After Franciscan envoys brought back information on what was known as Cathay (northern China) in the mid-13th century, Pope Nicholas IV, a former Franciscan, dispatched a Franciscan mission to the court of the grand khan in Dadu (known in Europe as Cambaluc). The missionaries formed the nucleus of a Catholic hierarchy on Chinese soil: Cambaluc became the seat of an archbishopric, and in 1323 a bishopric was established in Quanzhou. A renowned Franciscan missionary was Odoric of Pordenone, who traveled in China in the 1320s; his reports, together with letters written by other Catholic missionaries, brought firsthand information on China to medieval Europe and today throw some light on the earliest missionary work in China. The Franciscan mission, which had to compete with the Nestorian clergy, was carried on more by the foreigners in China than by the Chinese themselves. The friars preached in Tatar (i.e., either Mongol or Turkic) and apparently won no Chinese converts. Significantly, no Chinese source mentions the activities of these missionaries; the Chinese probably regarded the Franciscans as one of the many strange, foreign sects, perhaps an outlandish variety of Buddhism. Archaeological evidence of the presence of Europeans and of Roman Catholicism has been discovered only in modern times; one example is from Yangzhou (in present-day Jiangsu), where the Latin inscription on a tombstone dated 1342 is a record of the death of an Italian lady whose name suggests some relation to a Venetian family engaged in trade with Asia.

Only the last direct contact between the papal see and Yuan China can be corroborated by both Western and Chinese sources. In 1336 a group of Alani Christians in Dadu sent a letter to Pope Benedict XII, who sent John of Marignola with a mission to the Mongol court. The mission reached the summer capital, Shangdu, in 1342. Chinese sources recorded the date of its audience as Aug. 19, 1342. The country the envoys came from is given by the Chinese source as Fulang, a Chinese version of the name Farang (Franks), which was used in the Middle East as a general term for Europeans. The arrival of envoys from what must have seemed the end of the world so impressed the court that an artist was commissioned to paint a portrait of the battle horse that Marignola had brought as a present; this portrait was still extant in the 18th century but is now lost. Chinese literati wrote many eulogies on the portrait of the horse; the country of Fulang, however, did not interest the Chinese poets, and the whole embassy of Marignola is invariably described in terms that point to an unbroken Sino-centric attitude. Thus, the contact between the pontiff and the Mongol court remained without further consequence.

The end of Mongol rule over China and the strong nationalism of the Ming dynasty also doomed the Catholic missions of the 14th century. The reports of the Venetian adventurer Marco Polo, on the other hand, inaugurated for Europe the era of discoveries and created a new vision of the world, with China as a part.

Although China as a separate cultural entity was realized only dimly and gradually in the European West, Chinese influences spread under the Yuan dynasty to other parts of Asia. Chinese medical treatises were translated into Persian, and Persian miniature painting in the 13th and 14th centuries shows many influences of Chinese art. Chinese-type administration and chancellery practices were adopted by various Mongol dominions in Central Asia and the Middle East. It has even been suggested that the invention of gunpowder and of printing in Europe was because of a sort of stimulus diffusion from China, although a direct influence from China cannot be proved.

Chinese civilization itself remained very much what it had been before the Yuan dynasty, with a certain cultural isolationism a distinctive element. Neither the self-image of the Chinese nor China’s position in the world changed very drastically. The change and challenges to which China was exposed under the Yuan, however, can explain many of the characteristic traits of Ming history.

Perceptions of China, a country in East Asia, must be adjusted to its enormous scale. Its culture and its civilization go back thousands of years. Its vast area is the third largest in the world, after Russia and Canada, and China is Earth’s most populated country. Area 3,696,100 square miles (9,572,900 square kilometers). Population (2015 est.) 1,370,708,000.